busted ass

Yesterday, while completing the last task before being done with work, I did in fact bust my ass. It wasn't technically my ass as much as it was both shins, a knee, an elbow, my hands and, as it turns out, a hip.

Tuesday in many restaurants is a truck day. At some point, usually never at the best, most opportune moment, the day's deliveries begin to arrive. This means that the truck driver for your distributor of choice will show up with stacks of boxes that he will leave sitting in your walkway. You get to spend some amount of your day clearing this out.

Clearing the mess involves breaking the stacks into other stacks based on where things go. Cold and frozen items move immediately to their new, respective homes as the last thing you need is for your food to thaw or come to anywhere near room temperature. Next you'll put up your dry and canned goods followed by chemicals/cleaning products and disposables such as to go containers.

A large part of the job involves taking things out of boxes which tends to leave you with a stack or pile of empty boxes. I've gotten really good over the years at reducing a mess of boxes into a neatish stack of broken down and flattened cardboard.

Sometimes these broken down and flattened boxes will sit somewhere out of the way until someone has time to discard them. We discard ours by carrying them to the opposite side of the square, about a block a way, and a short way down an alley to a room where all the businesses close enough take their cardboard for recycling.

Throughout the square there are a number of benches and tables, the tables each surrounded by four small benches. They are great for people to sit and eat or to use their laptops or to sit and sway drunkenly while waiting for friends. Apparently they are also perfect for busting one's ass.

My last task yesterday was to take the cardboard, and we had quite a stack. I tried to position the boxes in a way that they would be somewhat easy to carry and would leave me able to see where I was going. The second part of that was not carried out as well as possible.

I exited the restaurant backward, using my back to push the door open. A customer was leaving at the same moment, and I was even able to hold the door for him with my foot after swinging the boxes out of his way. I then left our patio while attempting to manage the boxes and move them to a more reasonable hand hold. I did not succeed soon enough and was unaware of the ass busting so soon in my future.

I'm not sure which leg hit first. One of the tables with four small benches sits about ten to fifteen feet from our front door, and I tripped over one of the benches. I think what happened is that my right leg hit first as that bruise is placed at the right height for the bench. As I began to fall my left shin slammed even more abruptly into the bench causing me to fall harder. I cleared the bench rather spectacularly I assume as I seem to remember some feeling of flight as the boxes flew out of my hands. I'm pretty sure I came down on my knee and elbow at this point while slapping my hands onto the ground as I tried to catch myself.

No one saw this happen, but a couple a short distance away gave a most disapproving look to my voluble shout of FUCK! as I hit the ground.

I retrieved my boxes, and, in some amount of agony, continued on my way. The shins hurt just to walk and at the moment the next most painful thing were the heels of my hands. I finally reached the recycling room, tossed my boxes onto the pile and was finally able to visually asses the damage.

I have a nice cut/bruise combo on my elbow and a tiny blue bruise on my knee. Both shins are bruised blue and yellow with a minor abrasion to match. The hip shows no visible sign of damage but hurts nonetheless. The heels of my hands hurt a small amount but also show no visible signs of damage

Had anyone else seen my flight it would have at least had that humorous edge that doing something spectacularly stupid earns. As it is, the disapproving glance was all I got from anyone else, and the couple who provided that seemed less concerned with a hurt fellow human than with having heard a swear.

The moral of the story is to to watch where you're going. Don't start your box carrying journey till you know you can see the obstacles. And if you're going to hang out and work at Market Square for the number of years I have, for fuck sake learn where the benches and the table/bench combos are. They're bolted to the ground for fuck sake and don't change position.

I am not a hipster

To really describe the hipster is just too difficult. They are a seemingly less rare breed than I'd once assumed, but I also realize I'm not as up on what the kids are doing as I could be, though I can spot one when I see 'em. None of that is really the point, but suffice it to say I am not a hipster. The point really is a horrid, new trend I'm loathing lately.

I'm wondering how this happened, this new fashion I've seen too much of lately. It's not really new and certainly not a fashion I'd ever want to see back, but as summer winds to an end and the days become cooler and shorter, the shorts on the guys in my town have gotten noticeably shorter as well.

Honestly, it's been in the works for some time now I'm sure, and I can only assume it's some sort of nefarious plot the way I've suddenly seen this trend. I can honestly say that what wasn't really that cool in the early days of summer is upon us.

I can think of one guy in my town, not someone I'd really call a hipster as such, but in a sense he is, who was wearing the short shorts as far back as a couple years ago. I have to believe that he started it, though I must also admit that perhaps it's a universal hipster thing that he was only ahead of the curve on in our small town.

I think of these shorts as Larry Birds, because I'm always reminded of his pale self hanging every which way out of a green tank top and green short shorts. It's not a pretty sight, and it's not a pretty sight when some pale, local young twenty something with his finger on the pulse of all that's too cool for you and a scarf tied just so around his neck in ninety plus degree East Tennessee summer sports them with his beat up loafers.

I will not be wearing shorts that fall mid thigh. I really don't much wear shorts anyway, and I've always been able to prove I'm a dork in different ways. Besides, it's really too cool for me anyway.

contact

There's a closeness that I miss, a closeness that Momma and I shared even though I was so deeply in the closet throughout our relationship, a closeness that I miss, and I think sometimes that missing leads me to make decisions I wouldn't otherwise make. I think perhaps she has the same problem, but either I'm wrong or she's just unwilling to accept my view.

This is not meant to discount pure, animal horniness in any way, because that's there on some level. Like most humans I do indeed love sex. I can look at it from a distance, however, and wish for something more committed than just random hook ups. Hook ups I can get, but I've done well to avoid those situations and places that make it too easy, because it isn't really what I want.

But that idea of closeness also makes it difficult. It's so easy to confuse that closeness with sex sometimes. It's too easy to let sex stand in for the closeness I miss having.

Momma and I still have a great friendship and are closer than many people. I love her very much and am concerned for her and want great things for her. I'll hurt myself to help her. I'll fight for her. But there's a whole other level of whatever that we won't ever share again, an unexplainable thing I can only think of and describe as closeness.

I'm not sure that I really have a point in all this blathering. I sort of do, and it's between Momma and me, and you won't really get the point of this, and that's fine.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that sometimes fucking isn't the same as touching, though sometimes it is.

Also, don't read anything into this, because you're most likely wrong, because none of this is actually about me and Momma. It's about me and it's about Momma, she and I as individuals and not us as an us. We have our own issues separate from each other with randomly occurring Venn overlap.

p.s. no we didn't do it

p.p.s. it's also not about anything in particular as much as about attempting to do better for myself over a period of time

in the pines

Flipping through the channels out of boredom I stopped for a moment on the Biography channel. They were discussing Kurt Cobain. I held a certain fondness of Kurt and for Nirvana back in the day. That first video I saw featuring them in the school gym and Kurt in that green striped sweater was really powerful at that moment. It was one of the first songs that really shook me a bit and caused me stop and take notice. Before that I'd just sort of listened to music.

A little something in the way of background might be useful here. Given my upbringing I never had a lot of friends who were into whatever music was popular at the time. I was raised on some amount of bluegrass and gospel and Marian McPartland's Piano Jazz, among other things. So when I started choosing my own music it wasn't based much on peer pressure. There was the "classic rock" via Z93 if I remember correctly, thanks to a brother who may comment here and has, but there was also a lot of Billy Ocean and Rick Astley.

Of the tiny snippet of Kurt's bio that I caught was some discussion of Nirvana's MTV Unplugged appearance and their version of the song known by me as In The Pines. It's also known as Where Did You Sleep Last Night and even Black Girl. It's been recorded numerous times over the years and under an even greater number of titles than I've listed.

Regardless, it's a song I've loved for many years, and the reminder tonight caused me to look into it. I won't tell the whole of what I've found because someone already did a better job at Wikipedia HERE. What I will do is give a list of links to various versions of the song so that you can enjoy it too many times like I've done.

I enjoy The Stanley Brothers version a bit, traditional bluegrass style

Leadbelly did a great bluesy version of the song.

Who can argue with Dolly Parton?

And for a dose of OMG tragic with a taste of Rufus-how-could-you? also featuring some lesser people, and knowing my Rufus love . . . seriously, how?

Finally let's visit the Louvin Brothers doing a different song, the ever popular murder ballad Knoxville Girl.

alls I'm gonna say

Okay, we've all heard about the Balloon Boy kid and his parents worried sick about poor baby floating away in the UFO. I have very little in the way of opinion.

I do however have one question. Was America glued to this story out of concern, or did they just want to be watching when his little ass plummeted to earth?

takin the fam to the show-thanks Momma!

Tuesday night saw the whole family, me, Momma, Big Brother and The Boy, enjoying a night out at a local theater (or theatre as the Bijou prefers to refer to itself.)

We went to see one group but were mesmerized by the opening band. I have to admit to being proud of both kids. Big Brother makes me proud because he's open to new stuff and enjoys so much that kids aren't generally expected to like. To me it's not so much proof that my kid is special as much as it is proof that kids are cool. The Boy made me proud because he totally behaved in public even though he is what we might call in the south a bit of a fussbudget. That's a nice way of saying that he's ornery in his pickiness (bless his heart.)

We went to see Andrew Bird and were lucky to also get to see St. Vincent. I've included videos just down there a bit, and if you want you can skip ahead to the listening and not even bother reading anything else I've written. It might be your best bet actually.

First, St. Vincent, I had no idea what to expect. I'd read the blurb/interview in the local alternative newsweekly before realizing that they were opening for Andrew Bird who I'd been hoping to see for months since learning that he was going to be playing my small town. I have to admit that I went in with some air of impatience, looking forward to the band I wanted to see, assuming I'd sit patiently waiting, but St. Vincent put on a great show. Someone behind me, between songs, put it succinctly when he yelled, "We're enjoying your set!" Total Ktown moment that.

Part of my choosing the videos for the songs I'm posting is that I wanted good versions of live performances without having to use versions from talk shows (fuck Kimmel and Letterman in this instance.) I'm okay with at least decent sound and maybe a little crowd noise, but I really wanted to at least attempt to capture the feel of live, which of course isn't going to happen in YouTube videos in a blog post, but a girl wants to try.

Before we get to the music, set your television recording devices to PBS on 10/24 to catch both bands on Austin City Limits. You'll thank me.

So here is St. Vincent doing their song Now, Now.


Momma and I have been fans of Andrew Bird for a few years at this point. I was fortunate enough to see him in our small town a while back and loved the show. He's a great performer and is kinda on the hot side, which doesn't really mean shit in this instance. It's just an extra something.

Again, I wanted a video that at least nearly captured some amount of something you might get live, but having covered that as impossible already I'll just throw out the video. Actually, I'm giving you two Andrew Bird's. First is his song A Nervous Tic Motion of the Head to the Left which is one of his more popular songs. It's fine and all, but the second video is actually him sans band doing one of my favorite of his songs, Glass Figurine.